


flying high (exhaust fumes and fever dreams)

by the_garbage_will_do



Series: reyuxmas [4]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Podracing, Cheating, Drunken Kissing, F/M, Gambling, M/M, background finnpoerose, in games and relationships, probably pre-reylux, rey's so deep in denial
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-16
Updated: 2019-12-16
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:28:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21816652
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_garbage_will_do/pseuds/the_garbage_will_do
Summary: A razor-sharp Imperial accent. A black overcoat of luscious gaberwool. A heavy black pistol, suggested by the curve of one hip. A monomolecular blade tucked up one sleeve— not visible, but Poe has all the interviews that’ve ever mentioned Kylo Ren and Rey’s read every last one.“Rey of Jakku,” calls that sharp accent, one Rey never thought she’d actually hear. “A word, if you will?”“Armitage Hux. You wanted me?”
Relationships: Armitage Hux/Rey, Implied Armitage Hux/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, One-Sided Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Series: reyuxmas [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1620592
Comments: 6
Kudos: 30
Collections: Reyuxmas 2019





	flying high (exhaust fumes and fever dreams)

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Reyuxmas Week 4. The prompt is "games & indoor activities."
> 
> I ignored Tatooine's canonical calendar.

“Knock it off, or I’ll wash your circuits out with soap!”

Rey shouldn’t still be awake. She’s meant to be sleeping; if she sleeps like the dead she might just skip joining their number. And truly she had tucked herself under her blankets two hours back, striving hard not to think of sleek black engines and a black mask streaked with chrome and how they infuriate her, how they shoot her veins up with a desert storm Jakku could only hope to match. She lay in bed and tried to be good, but BB8 just rendered all that futile, crashing into her bedside table with a profane and otherwise inarticulate screech.

“Back up, _where_ am I wanted?”

A cantina. BB8 wants her awake and at a cantina right this second, and it’s willing to use any measures to get what it wants—

“All right, put that thing back!”

Chastened, it retracts its shock prod as she summons clothes to one hand and her own shock prod— Rose had insisted— to the other. Stealthy as she can, she scrambles out of her quarters. She half-expects to find Poe and Finn and Rose asleep in the main room, a tender tangle of limbs. Yet the ship’s main room is dark and empty.

“Are they in their quarters?”

BB8 ignores her, instead flinging itself out of the ship and into the chilly Tatooine night.

.

Tatooine’s just another busted-up ramshackle backwater of the galaxy— once again devoid of any literal water not painstakingly leached from arid air. Rey grew up in a pile of discarded parts rather like this one. Yet this desert is freezing, locked in a decade-long winter season, a danger to engines and humans alike. The cold’s thrown her off from the second she got here.

BB8’s adapted faster. It throws out an even twistier stream of cusswords now, thrusting itself between banthas and rickshaws at top speed. Its cuteness doesn’t get it far on Tatooine. Its shock prod gets it further. Pulling her shawl tight, Rey squints through the sand-laden winter winds and runs to keep up.

It leads her past two cantinas to a third— a quiet-looking establishment, walls soft and worn like everything else in Mos Espa. But the noise from inside flares sharp, music and cheers and shouts from drinkers and gamblers all warring with each other, and BB8 rolls in with a plaintive yelp. Still she hesitates at the entrance. If she wastes tonight here, she might not live to tomorrow night.

On the other hand she’s never been to a cantina, never tasted liquor. She’s never tasted any sort of sin outside visions she’ll never admit to— _a pretentious black mask tossed aside carelessly, black-clothed knees forced to the floor and full lips moving in admission and apology, in reverence as_ she _reigns supreme — _and now she might not make it to tomorrow night.

She steps inside.

.

“BB8, get _off_ that droid! I swear, if you keep acting out Poe _will_ get around to that memory wipe—”

Though BB-series astromech droids have no limbs to speak of, BB-8 and another BB-unit all in black have cleared the center of the cantina with a no-holds-barred wrestling match. Sparks and wires and hemispheric heads fly at all angles as BB-8 blithely ignores Rey and carries on gouging. She considers leaping between the droids, but they might barrel right through her and there’s _no_ upside whatsoever to showing up tomorrow with broken kneecaps—

“Full retreat.”

The black droid tosses out one last minor-key insult before rolling away, weaving through the crowd to the bar, to the master that brought it to heel in a mere three syllables.

A mere three syllables thrill Rey to the bone.

A razor-sharp Imperial accent. A black overcoat of luscious gaberwool. A heavy black pistol, suggested by the curve of one hip. A monomolecular blade tucked up one sleeve— not visible, but Poe has all the interviews that’ve ever mentioned Kylo Ren and Rey’s read every last one.

“Rey of Jakku,” calls that sharp accent, one she never thought she’d actually hear. “A word, if you will?”

BB-8 lets out another panicked flood of beeps. _Warning: it’s him. Warning: he made that evil droid. And BB-9E said you had to get here and I had to get you here and where’s Finn and Rose and WARNING: WHERE’S POE_

With the Force, Rey checks her shock prod. It’s still snug against her thigh.

She strides up to sit at the bar beside him as if she’s envisioned this a thousand times. She hasn’t. Kylo Ren was one thing, but he has always been a real enough nemesis. By contrast this man has seemed a ghost, floating in the footnotes of articles, in hologram backgrounds.

She had never prepared for him in the flesh.

“Armitage Hux. You wanted me?” 

“Your friends are wonderfully protective of you.”

He says the words lazily, laces them with a silver-edged threat. Without thinking she spits, “What did you do to them?”

Naive, it strikes her again that she’s _shiny-new-naive._ She thought the game didn’t start until tomorrow.

“More interesting—” he takes a leisurely sip of his iced winter drink, and Rey would speed this up with her shock prod if this wasn’t one of the few fights she might just lose— “is what they did for you. Or tried to do. Their attempt was touching, if pathetic.”

Rey scowls. “Their attempt at _what?”_

Hux glances up at her, piercing her through, checking that her confusion is real. Once satisfied, he shrugs. “Sabotage. The three of them tripped the alarms in Kylo’s garage, presumably on their way to disable his pod.”

Though the dim lights hide it, her cheeks color. Poe trusts her. Said he trusts her. 

“I—” she stammers, “I didn’t know. I swear I didn’t—”

“Smart, he left you plausible deniability.”

“No!” Rey squawks. “Well, yes, but…”

“But what?”

“But he said I could win this. Sincerely. Not by breaking my opponents’ pods.”

She hates how small she sounds.

Hux stares at her a moment, about to snarl. Instead he simply sighs and throws back the rest of his liquor. “Look. As I see it, it’s a vote of confidence on Dameron’s part that he thinks you’re worth the trouble. For the past few years he’s been content on the sidelines while his ‘talent’ self-immolates—”

Despite her current humiliation, a protective urge flares. “Poe’s an excellent scout!”

“The gamblers love him, he always gives them a safe bet to avoid.” Hux lets out a snort. “Dameron’s lost enough pilots to run a fleet.”

At Rey’s feet BB8 lets out a sad whistle, its head sliding to hang low.

“Where is he right now? What did you do to him?” Rey demands, swerving back on track. It occurs to her that, for someone as rich as Kylo Ren, murder is not strictly illegal on Tatooine. 

Hux smiles skewed, as if he’s read her mind. “Lucky for you, Kylo didn’t find them. Phasma was on duty, so they’ll retain all their limbs and wake up sometime tomorrow on the other side of the planet, well after the race’s started. Possibly in the manure pile of a bantha stable.”

Though she winces, relief blasts through her. 

“And why,” Rey replies after composing herself, “are you telling me this?”

“Hm?”

“If you just wanted revenge, waiting for me to wake up alone tomorrow and find my scout and engineers missing would’ve done the trick.”

Hux doesn’t answer. Instead he asks, “What’s your relationship with Kylo Ren?”

“I don’t have one.”

She figures nightly hate-fantasies probably shouldn’t count.

“And yet according to that one interview Dameron got you,” Hux observes, now nursing a new drink, “you came to Tatooine expressly to face him. You came to the Boonta Eve Classic Podrace, his ‘grandfather’s sacred ground’—” and there’s something snide about how he says those words, but she can’t quite put her finger on it— “expressly to destroy him. How do you explain that?” 

“Easy,” she declares with a toss of the head. “Kylo Ren is smug, and arrogant about his family legacy. He’s insufferably rude towards everyone who doesn’t have the luck to be him. He’s a danger to other racers and to spectators because he’s decided the safety precautions don’t apply to him, and the judges let him get away with it because he’s just that awesome or because he mind-tricks them, I don’t know, and, and, the amount of unnecessary spinning he does is, quite frankly, preposterous!”

Her chest heaves by the time she finishes her monologue; she’s rehearsed it a hundred times. A few seconds later he glances up from his drink.

“Did you think I’d object?” he deadpans. “The only inaccuracy is the rudeness part.”

“He’s not rude?” she exclaims, immediately gathering twenty interviews to prove her point.

“Oh, he is,” Hux agrees. “He just doesn’t exempt himself from the ill treatment.”

Rey doesn’t know what to say to that.

“But you,” he continues. “You’re an orphan from Jakku. Bought yourself out of slavery. Survived against all odds, taught yourself how to build, managed to get a scout in the middle of nowhere, even if it was only Dameron.”

“I’ve heard my life story, thank you.”

She tries to match his flippant tone, but real gratitude flares in her. It’s mixed with awe that an engineer of Hux’s stature was interested enough in her to read the one article that mentioned her name.

“I have to conclude that you do not in fact have a death wish,” Hux says, slurring his words slightly as he polishes off another glass. She doesn’t know much about alcohol, but he seems to be in a race of his own. “So again, why challenge Kylo Ren over Anakin Skywalker’s ashes?”

He punctuates this with a sloppy wave of the hand that knocks his other neighbor’s glass off the counter.

Rey can see the whole aftermath before her eyes— the neighbor demanding a replacement, Hux refusing with jagged sarcasm, an instant bar-wide brawl. She reaches out and stops it in its tracks, catching the glass in midair, letting it hover in midair through the Force.

Hux’s lips freeze in a perfect “O.”

With a flick of her hand she raises the glass back onto the counter without spilling a drop, wondering whether this too was a setup.

“I’m going to beat him,” she declares with increasing heat. “Nothing you do will stop me. He’s _mine.”_

Hux’s eyes narrow. “Are you one of Kylo’s _fangirls?”_

“No!” Rey flushes red with rage.

He tips his head and tips back the rest of his liquor.

“So you have the Force,” he says a moment later, almost to himself. “You should get rid of your pod’s stabilizers.”

“I should...are you trying to kill me?”

“If I were trying you wouldn’t see it coming.” The words ripple easy off his tongue, and then he’s back at it: “You just dropped a thousand credits installing the newest autopilot system. Get rid of it, it’ll hold you back out on the racetrack.”

“But Rose said—”

“Rose Tico’s a competent engineer, but not for this game, not at this level. She wants _clean-exhaust engines_ in _Podracing,”_ he adds, as if that explains it all.

And if Rey’s honest, it does.

“There’s no one better in the whole game,” she says out loud, still trying to stand up for her team.

He answers her with an icy look.

“Why are _you_ helping me?” she says, somewhat chastised.

He snaps his fingers, and the bartender immediately serves up another iced drink. “Turns out my partnership with Kylo’s not exclusive. I caught him flirting with a Sienar-Jaemus engine last night—”

A murmur interrupts him, rolling through the cantina. Rey turns and nearly topples off her rickety barstool. 

Kylo Ren.

Kylo Ren is in the same cantina as her. He just entered the doorway behind Armitage, mask off, hair an unruly tangle around his face, and though she’s seen every holorecord that’s ever tried to capture his image none did him justice. He instantly lashes out at the waiters and bookkeepers at the entryway, barking at them, stormy eyes darting about as if he’s searching for something.

Hux jabs her in the thigh. Though she’s spent half her life hating Kylo Ren, it’s difficult to tear her gaze away.

“Rose Tico’s a competent engineer,” Hux says once he refocuses her attention, now slurring the words with a new viciousness. “But you need your pod rebuilt from scratch. Call me, if you survive tomorrow.”

“I’ll do more than survive,” she vows, all her synapses set alight by the arrival of her archenemy. “I’ll win this.”

“Are you entirely above sabotage,” Hux drawls back, “or have you got a darker side?”

Rey looks and contemplates Kylo. He’s irascible. Unredeemable. Tall, dark, and infuriating in every way.

Perhaps it takes dark to fight dark.

“I’ll let you in on a secret,” Hux continues, seductive like cinnamon. “Physical damage is overkill. The most exquisite sabotage is a matter of psychological reconditioning.” 

She looks back and leans in, beguiled against her will.

“Just convince your opponent,” he says, his silvertongue lilting and softer than she ever imagined, “he’s lost before the game’s even begun.”

Hux’s eyes dart down to her lips.

His lips seem softer than she ever imagined.

She might go up in flames tomorrow.

So she indulges. She curls her fingers in the wool on his shoulders and drinks him in. She snatches her first taste of sin in the cinnamon liquor on his ice-cold lips, and the gun’s gone off and she’s gone up in flames and the games have begun. Hux pulls away first, breathless with ruddy cheeks, and he pays his tab and gets to his feet, slightly unsteady. Yet his voice is brutally sharp when he steps up to Kylo.

“What,” he snaps, “did you think our partnership was exclusive?”

He brushes past Kylo Ren, leaving him dumbstruck, and pauses once more by the bookkeepers at the door. Raising his voice, he pulls out his wallet once more. “Put me down for 500 credits, on Rey of Jakku.”

In the ensuing chaos he sweeps out. Rey grabs what remains of his drink— cinnamon and nutmeg and liquor that warms her from the inside out— and drains it all. Her eyes meet Kylo’s, and she’s flying high, finding a fury there to match her own. 

“Come on, BB-8. Let’s get back home.” 

She hops off the stool and cuts a sharp pathway through the cantina, running Kylo down, forcing him to stumble out of her way. She heads down to the gamblers and slaps down another five credits under her name.

She’s feeling lucky tonight.


End file.
